Posts
Reading Difficult Books
I've always just ploughed (or slogged) through particularly long and challenging books in one go, the same as I would for anything. I'd love to have a better "active reading" strategy though, and one that I actually stick to. "Steelmanning" an argument sounds like a great tool for that. — A Note On Reading Difficult Books by Brad DeLong
Work Ethic
— Learning About Work Ethic From My High School Driving Instructor, James Somers in The Atlantic
Adam Driver On Marriage Story
— Adam Driver Has Put Everything He's Got On Screen, Kyle Buchanan in New York Times
PearShaped Magazine Archive
When I was at university, me and some friends founded a music magazine and ran it for a few years before handing it off to the next generation of students when we graduated. It ran on for a few years after we left and then closed. I noticed recently that the hosting was about to expire, so I exported the magazine's content and turned it into a basic static site so it wasn't lost forever. It's the PearShaped Magazine Archive.
The List of 2010 Lists
This guy has been collecting all the "Best x of the 2010s" lists that have been appearing in the past few weeks into an impressive list of lists. Here are some of my highlights:
My Top Books of 2019
These are the books I most enjoyed reading in 2019, compiled from my Goodreads Reading Challenge.
What We Don't Know About Sylvia Plath
— What We Don't Know About Sylvia Plath, Emily Van Duyne in Lit Hub
Finland's Media Literacy
Examples of good news stories about information warfare are rare. Here's a story about Finland's quick and comprehensive response to Russian information warfare and interference in western elections. The Finns introduced programs for schools, businesses, government workers and more to address the problem.
Screen Protectors
There were a couple of articles this week about people behind screens undertaking pain-staking work to protect vulnerable children. Firstly, there's this article from The Verge about poorly treated contractors reviewing imagery depicting violence and child abuse for large platforms like Google and Facebook. Secondly, there's this investigation by Bellingcat that takes a collection of anonymised images from Europol and finds the precise location and date range in which they were taken through increasingly complex methods. Tying it all together, I just finished Tinfoil Butterfly this week. From the synopsis:
Tech Sabbath
This excerpt from 24/6 by Tiffany Shlain makes the case for setting aside a day to go tech free: ditching phones and laptops and screens for the day. It's come along just at the right time for me, as I'm generally shrinking away from tech outside of my work life more and more. I like the way the article describes what you might need a tech-free day: a basic watch, a pen, and a little notebook containing some emergency phone numbers. Slightly idealistically it argues that the day then becomes about the basics: seeing friends, hanging out and chatting, playing...
Wasps
I read the Penguin Classics translation of Wasps by Aristophanes the other day. It's a satirical play about how an older generation of Athenians who fought in the Peloponnesian War were taken in by a pandering demagogue called Cleon. To grasp what's happening and get the jokes, you have to know a little bit about the context of Athenian politics at the time and how the jury system worked. But all of that is explained in a very quick note at the beginning of the edition. The point of this note though is that it's funny, really funny! It's broad...
The Académie Française
I was vaguely aware that the French language is basically policed by the Académie Française, but I'd never seen this statistic that really shows how small the base French vocabulary is. Aptly enough I saw it in this article about the French propensity to say... no. — The Culture Map by Erin Meyer via BBC
Eugenics & Statistics
There were lots of interesting and terrible things in Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini but here's something that stood out. Eugenics was a widely respected field of study around the time of the turn of the 20th century, well before the rash of state-sponsored genocide programs we now associate with Nazis etc. University College London established a Eugenics Record Office, that aimed to study races of man and conct the best ways to hone the (presumably white) superior race to perfection. Of the many people who were both active in the field then, and still respected...
Jacob Rees-Mogg Profile
James Meek (author of Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs To Someone Else) did a great profile of new Leader of the Commons, Jacob Rees-Mog. It sums up the argument incredibly well that the stuffy all-English persona he affects in Parliament is at odds with his source of income in a transnational investment firm. Meek goes deep on the problematic network of offshore financial instruments used to shroud Mogg's investment firm in secrecy, which makes sense given his work on Private Island. Meek goes beyond that oft-bandied about analysis, though. He argues that these "two Jacobs" are two sides of...
Madame Tussaud's Tall Tale
I started reading Little by Edward Carey without knowing what it was about. Soon it emerged that it's a fictionalisation of the life of Madame Tussaud based on her memoirs. It is typical of a revolutionary French narrative in that it involves a exploited child orphan, the beautiful disarray of Paris at the time, and finally: no shortage of chance encounters with significant historical figures that begin to stretch the reader's credulity. I haven't finished the book yet but the young orphan has already had personal interactions with: I'm sure that Madame Tussaud had a fascinating life that brushed up...
William Carlos Williams on love and cruelty
I've been reading The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson and there's tons of great extracts and references. One that caught me in particular was this excerpt from The Ivy Crown by William Carlos Williams, which (I think) disputes the rosy typical notions about love but reaffirms it as a wilder, more brutal thing: It's a nice disputation of the oft-quoted 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:
The Sinking of the USS Fitzgerald
For some reason I feel really compelled by accounts of the crash involving the USS Fitzgerald that killed sseven crew members. It's a really interesting case of how the build up of lots of little decisions, shortcuts, putting crew under pressure, can lead to something dreadful. I first heard about it in detail from this amazing This American Life segment by Stephanie Foo. More recently though, ProPublica published this incredibly detailed and moving account of the incident. I love things that dig into awful events so meticulously. Another example is The Death of A President by William Manchester, Secret Service...
Bob Fosse, Joseph, and Rihanna
I was watching Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999) the other day. It's the height of camp, and I was trying to work out what the elements were and what they reminded me of. Then it came to the introductory Potiphar number and it clicked. The Rich Man's Frug is a dance number that appears in Sweet Charity (1969), a musical comedy directed by the choreographer Bob Fosse. It typifies Bob Fosse's style: absurdist elements, people-as-stage, and intense camp. It had to have inspired that Potiphar number, right? There's one more place it popped up recently: in Rihanna, DJ...
The Professor
The emcee stood off to the side of the stage in darkness and in a rented tux. Standing in amongst the clutter of the backstage area he swallowed a choke as he tried to clear his throat quietly. Reaching into his jacket pocket he felt the thick stack of note cards there and shut his eyes for a moment, allowing the cool calm of their presence to wash through him. He turned to his side and gestured to the drama student stooped over the lighting board. He removed the note cards from his pocket, gripped them lightly in his hand,...
It’s Just You And Me And Everybody Else
If they’d given me a nose I think I’d have smelled the alcohol on your breath yesterday morning. I should give myself some credit; they didn’t give me the best ears but I could still hear that slight slurring in your speech. I could hear you being a little more abrupt with the rest of the crew. I could hear you being a little less clear with the tower in Prague. We’ve been up here together enough times that I can spot the tiny differences. I doubt even the crew would have been able to tell just by listening to...
Candlesticks
Tonight, Kwame would clean the altar. He walked to the front of the chapel. He methodically clicked each in a row of switches and light soaked the altar. Standing next to the altar in the bright lights, Kwame couldn’t make out the first row of pews. His breathing slowed there in the warmth. He stood next to the altar and allowed his arms to hang by his sides. The very end of his middle fingertip brushed on the cotton tablecloth. He stood six feet and half an inch tall. Each time he measured himself he hoped that the downward force...
Confessions Of A News Addict
Hello. My name is Jack… [Group: Hello, Jack] …and I’m a news addict. In the earliest seconds of my waking day, as my brain begins to comprehend the external world and puts away the psychedelic nonsense of my dreams, I reach for the news. Around 9.30 every morning, or earlier if I’m awoken by whatever song I’ve decided to try and numb the pain of a 9am seminar with, I unplug my phone and open up the news. Being a news junkie of the caliber that I have reached means that I’ve spent years trimming, optimising, and maximising the flow...
That Accessibility Thing
Last year, surgeons removed my grandad’s left leg below the knee. He has had the daily symptoms of diabetes for as long as I can remember. A visit to my grandparents’ house as a child meant being fascinated and unnerved in equal measure by insulin needles on the kitchen table, insulin needles piercing his belly. My grandad is an engineer. He was a car mechanic when he was younger, he worked in a steel mill, he was a maintenance guy at hospitals. His garage is really just a workshop, with a half dozen of those huge tool cabinets, full of...
Tinkering
I spend a lot of my time picking apart how things work, and a lot of time sticking things together to see if they work in the way that I hope. That’s tinkering. I’ve been thinking about how I first started working this way. I remember when I was a kid, I spent long days in my dad’s office. His office was actually a garage, a separate building from the house, across the back yard. He had his main desk in the corner, three computers lined up underneath with one of those boxy, ninetees monitors on top. His workspace was...
@fat - Internet Historian
Rives TED Talk If you take a listen to Rives’ great TED talk from 2006 today, it’s pretty easy to see it as a little time capsule. Here he is talking (eloquently and entertainingly) about Napster and Friendster. What was, at the time, a piece of pop culture criticism and entertainment, is just as easily viewed as artefact of an era in the internet history. The internet moves fast, look at how quickly we moved from the bullshit-ly labelled Internet 1.0, to Internet 2.0, to deciding that numbering eras of the internet like that is stupid. That’s how a talk...